Why most GTM models fail and how to build one that scales

Jason Hemingway: Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with business leaders shaping how organizations grow, adapt, and connect with customers around the world. I’m your host, Jason Hemingway. I’m the CMO at Phrase, and today we’re tackling a challenge that sits right at the intersection of ambition and reality.

Jason Hemingway: How do you scale go-to-market across countries, languages, and very different customer expectations without building a machine that loses sight of the very people you’re trying to reach? That’s the crux of it today, and joining me is

Jason Hemingway: Axel Kirstetter. Now, Axel’s career spans almost three decades, helping both startups and billion-dollar SaaS companies build global go-to-market strategies, and they work across different countries and cultures.

Jason Hemingway: So it should be a brilliant discussion, and Axel, I’m just saying, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Great to have you.

Jason Hemingway: How are you?

Axel Kirstetter: Jason, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It’s been ages since we spoke, and I’m doing fantastic.

Jason Hemingway: Great. Well, Axel, let’s start with a question I ask most people about their career.

Jason Hemingway: And you’ve had a diverse career spanning, as I said, the startup environment and large companies, but how have you seen the role of marketing evolve, especially when it comes to that kind of idea of globally scaling?

Axel Kirstetter: I think in your introduction, you already mentioned, you know, 30-year career, thank you for aging me; half of that was spent in Europe, the other half was spent in the States. And so I’ve seen, you know, various dynamics from working for European companies in Europe, European companies in the States, US companies in Europe, and US companies in the States. And so you have a very different perspective and mindset given where you’re at in the environment that you work in.

Axel Kirstetter: And I think the globalization aspect and dynamics have always been quite interesting for a lot of companies in that, I don’t know, many years ago, information about sort of other countries wasn’t as prevalent, languages weren’t as well known, Germany and English wasn’t quite there. That really started in, sort of, I don’t know, after the wall came down, where English just became the de facto business language. I still remember, and you probably as well, you know, living in London when a lot of Southern Europeans, they just couldn’t speak any English, or went to the UK to speak English, to learn how to speak it.

Axel Kirstetter: That’s now changed. Everyone pretty much, even going to Italy, Greece, Spain, what have you. They speak perfect English, and you find it quite surprising. So that’s one of the things that’s changed. And I think from there, also the speed of just being able to find information, engaging with the local market, the knowledge of what it takes to be successful has just vastly accelerated. A combination of linguistic access, but also internet, mobile, you know, the availability of information, and all these things just make the access of international markets, global markets a lot easier. And then you can have the genuine discussions as to do we want to go, what positions do we wanna take? Is it a, you know, trying to be number one in the market over five years? Is it just a side revenue for us? So, some of those things have changed, where in the past, you were pretty clear long business case, going to the board, right now, it’s a bit more of a, you know, see what happens without a major cost involved, without any major risk of failure, ’cause the barrier of entry has just gotten so much lower.

Axel Kirstetter: I think, I mean, all of the above, like, makes total sense, and I think the barrier of entry moving away is massively valid, but so, how do you think marketing teams now approach it as they sort of think about this international side of things?

Axel Kirstetter: So rather than just thinking locally, how do they sort of, or in your experience, how have you approached that kind of thinking internationally?

Axel Kirstetter: Yeah. One of the things that, so I’ve worked mostly in regulated environments where some of the ‘how do you’ is just imposed on you or are restricted by the legal framework that you can operate in, but I think outside of that, you also have the challenge of, you know, knowing what the local norms are. So, if you’re more on a B2C type of platform or a proposition, the way payments happen in Europe is very different to the way payments happen in the States. Yeah. And so you need to know that in order to appreciate how you need to build out your product, how you need to go and do your go-to-market.

Axel Kirstetter: I always like to utilize the example of when I came to the States, and the big advertisement back then was, “Hey, you know, you can deposit your checks so much quicker in our bank. Just take a picture of it and send it off to us.” Coming from Europe, you go, what do you mean check? What are you talking about? This paper trail. Where you simply utilize, you know, some bank code and IBAN code or, directly, the details of the bank, and you just send it off electronically. And then from there, you know, it’s still quite uncommon in the States to have a, typically, give you a credit card, and they take a credit card somewhere in the back, and they swipe it through, and they come back and ask you to sign something.

Axel Kirstetter: Whereas internationally, pretty much the standard is, you know, tap it on some machine that’s being rolled through you, and you see it. And then you go to places like India, where they don’t even utilize credit cards that much, but they have sort of a QR code system, which is very great for mobile payment.

Axel Kirstetter: Unless you know that you can design your products and your entire campaigns in a way that makes zero sense. And so that’s something that you need to be mindful of, where you need to tap into your local teams. Be very open to how they respond to the campaigns, the approach, the ideas and adjust accordingly.

Axel Kirstetter: You know, there’s always the thing of global to local, and I think that’s become even more important, that sure, you can translate again, barrier of entry of a translation with AI tools is very, very low. But you do need to meet customer expectations around the services and the quality difference.

Axel Kirstetter: And how do you do it? Just by knowing from your local team what works and what doesn’t. I work in insurance now, and again, those differences in the UK, as you know, you just go to some kind of online marketplace, and that’s where you buy insurance; home insurance, car insurance, in particular, life insurance, none of that exists in the States.

Axel Kirstetter: It’s predominantly through a broker. Sure, there’s some online destinations as well, but very different way to go-to-market and then your channels change accordingly. So again, how do you find that out? Talk to your local teams. Obviously, trust needs to be there so that you have the right relationship.

Axel Kirstetter: And yeah, you need to be, adapt agile to change the, not the message, but how you get that message into the hands of customers.

Jason Hemingway: Well, yeah. Well, and I think that’s an interesting part, isn’t it? I mean, some of what you talked about is very infrastructure-based, knowing the infrastructure, knowing how people can kind of do stuff.

Jason Hemingway: But there’s also that communication side of things, which marketing does. Without belittling a tool, the infrastructure side of things, you know, if you think of your 4 Ps, making sure that people can actually buy your product in the places that they want to is massively important, and you don’t put any friction in that process. But when we talk about marketing in particular, in regions and countries, what do you think about in terms of challenges you face in terms of getting messages across to people and making sure, you talked a little bit there about alignment and making sure the message doesn’t kind of go off piste into other areas or, you know, that phrase, which is probably overused, especially in our market, is that lost in translation, but how do you keep that message on point, and make sure that it resonates locally in your opinion, or what are the challenges really?

Axel Kirstetter: Challenges. So one of the things, one of the ways that brands…take a step back, I do believe nowadays, for brands to stand out, it has to be through authenticity. Just [00:08:00] because with Gen AI, you can achieve so much content and words that to stand out from the sort of mass volume produced content, you have to have authenticity in your brand.

Axel Kirstetter: One way that a lot of brands will do that inevitably is humanizing the language through humor. And with humor, there’s always the risk. And humor doesn’t always have to be, you know, a parody or a sketch, but just sort of an engaging, interesting, I don’t wanna say funny, but basically a humane way to engage with someone.

Axel Kirstetter: When you do that, there’s always the risk that the linguistic sort of ideas that you put forward do not translate from one language to the other, even the US and UK, very different ways to do advertising to communicate an idea out. So, how do you then do that? I mean, US companies tend to have that sort of centralized model where, you know, at headquarters everything is decided and then just pushed out into the regions. But one way to do that, in terms of sort of to inform, to provide the feedback, what have you, is just to do message testing. This is something that has gotten lost over the last, I don’t know, 20 years, where you know, PVC companies just threw money to grow, grow, grow, and it was all a big push. Now that those things are getting a little bit tighter, it’s more about efficiencies. You do need to spend a bit more time on that market research, ideation, insights equation, and the old word of ‘the focus group’ is coming back.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah.

Axel Kirstetter: The focus group have changed as well.

Axel Kirstetter: You can do a lot of things online nowadays. There’s different types of market research, but those are worth doing, like it’s very easy now to work out the effectiveness of your various outbound channels. Switch them on, switch them off, but you can save a lot of money. And shifting some of that testing or experimentation that you do on a channel level by putting it upfront on the research, what works in market.

Axel Kirstetter: That would be my one, you know, big recommendation. And even within Europe, what’s humorous in one country is just not working in another country, right?

Axel Kirstetter: Yeah, 100%. And I think that’s a, you know, if you think about marketing in general or even like business strategy, a lot of research gets kind of washed over, and actually to take that step back and go, let’s think about what we’re trying to do, who the audience is, what are the idiosyncrasies of that market or that audience is that we want to tap into despite having that sort of central kind of running theme of this is the kind of core message that we wanna put out, this is the value statement, but if you start injecting humor, I do think there’s actually, yeah, there is risks to that and you have to step back and start getting it right. And I think when you talk a little bit, and I saw some stuff that you’ve spoken about on the PMM Leaders Summit, you know, about how marketing teams can embrace AI, and one of the things that struck me was the idea of AI teammates.

Axel Kirstetter: So, from your leadership perspective, what are the most important considerations when thinking about AI to enhance, you know, that creative element perhaps, and especially when scaling across countries and or even with unique customer demands as you talked about?

Axel Kirstetter: Plenty of studies out there. How many people can a manager manage to be sort of effective? 6, max 7 is sort of commonly the numbers that we hear, and as you probably know, the fewer people you manage, the happier you are because you offload all that admin burden. But now you also need to think about, you know, how do you, like, someone needs to supervise AI? There’s sort of, I think about three ways around AI.

Axel Kirstetter: You have sort of, and in order not to make it AI-centric, but rather human-centric, there are tasks that only humans can do, there are tasks that humans can do augmented by AI, and there’s a task that you just automate, which will be done by AI. And then the question now becomes, well, how many of those agents or tasks, workflows can a person supervise?

Axel Kirstetter: Different research out there, I’m sort of reading stuff between 25 to 30 agents that one person can supervise. Feels high, especially when you’re looking at, hold on, you want me to manage 6 humans and 30 agents, becomes a lot. But that’s kind of the new frontier that we need to get our head around. Just for the audience to understand, you know, agent and workflow, what the heck does that mean? When you have a battle card, for example, there’s sort of a couple of elements that need to go into it. Someone has to research the competitor. Task one. Agent one. Someone has to lay out the, well, before you lay it out, which is task three, but analyze the information.

Axel Kirstetter: So, research task one, analyze information, task two, task three, lay it out in some kind of a format, it needs to be displayed somewhere. And then task four, the distribution mechanism as well. There’s other ways to slice it down, but those will be four agents to create one battle card. And obviously, one battle card, now you can do it for, I don’t know, 6, 7, 8 competitors. In this world, a battle card could be, maybe once every two weeks, a human could be doing this, but I think now if you have that sort of model set in place, you may be looking at being able to produce, I don’t know, one a day, so you can actually, instead of it taking eight weeks for four, you kind of take one week to produce all these battle cards.

Axel Kirstetter: That being said, and this is still critical, human in the loop. So, you need to verify how accurate is the information, how up-to-date is the information? LLMs take a while to consume all of the stuff that’s out there. Quite often, it ignores sort of the, not the hard facts, but the, you know, reputation elements or some of the more immediate things like people coming, people going, which is more, that FUD.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Axel Kirstetter : So the doubt, which is not hard factor information, but interesting from a competitive perspective as well. Anyway, so that’s kind of how I see the function evolving, and in your space, there will be fifth element, of course, the translation, you need to roll this out into languages.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, and I think it’s decided, you know, especially in our space, it’s having people who can decide when the agents are appropriate and what they should be doing and monitoring the output, like you said, and kind of building a kind of feedback loop to improve. Now obviously, you know, maybe one of the directions of travel could be that the agents can do bits of that as well eventually, but there still has to be somebody sort of going, okay, is this right? Checking it, making sure the errors is, teaching it further. So, I think there’s the overarching thing, productivity, massive amount of productivity there. But looking at what tasks are appropriate, I guess, is to sort of paraphrase what you’re saying. So, that was one area that you talked about for product marketing in particular, like battle cards, but more broadly, what other things in product marketing, which is kind of a place that you’ve spent a lot of time in your career, what other things do you see that AI is really, really helping with?

Jason Hemingway: Across the board, it’s first of all an accelerator of things. It allows you to bring together that inbound and outbound product marketing a lot easier, so outbound is message to market, be it sales enablement, campaigning, et cetera. Inbound is a bit more of that research, insight analysis. It levels out the playing field on the skillset level. So, I know, you know, I’ve always believed some people prefer to, sort of, in product marketing, to write down content, create content, others like the analysis, be it sizing, pricing, and then, there’s sort of some people that just like the PowerPointing. And I think AI tools level out the playing field now, so that irrespective of your interest and background, you can become a much broader professional, and not just sort of be stuck or be focused on a particular area.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s liberating in that sense that it can offer you places that perhaps you didn’t feel more comfortable with, but you can quickly come up to speed and produce decent-level content.

Axel Kirstetter: I think that’s what it’s all about. And obviously, I think the real challenge now is what exactly does human in the loop mean in all this context? You know, I think especially at the entry level, when you don’t have as much knowledge, there’s a high risk of just being automated. So, then comes in the more experienced people; the sort of directors, senior direct VP level plus, where you have the knowledge, both in terms of product as well as in terms of industry vertical, and you can sort of say, yeah, this is good information. No, that’s not so good information. Where things always get interesting is, you know, we just talk about battle cards and, you know, wider field, your competitive intelligence. One area where you always compete on, but it’s never really covered, is the do nothing, and do nothing in particular, is, well, what’s the realistic alternative that needs to be sort of fleshed out as well? Turns out LLMs are actually not as good at taking that into a structured format because when you send them via an agent, these are sort of prescriptive rules. Go find X on the internet.

Axel Kirstetter: There’s nothing on the internet to be found about ‘do nothing.’ So, you do need to go back again and figure out, well, what does do nothing mean in practice? And bit of a risk that, you know, we become dumber by just allowing agents to do all the work. So, inevitably, humans still need to be there to remind ourselves, Hey, not everything is down to the bot and the intelligence behind the scene.

Axel Kirstetter: Yeah. I think it doesn’t replace good thinking or critical human thinking.

Jason Hemingway: That’s the thing that I think you need to keep in mind, right?

Axel Kirstetter: Exactly.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. So, it’s, go on.

Axel Kirstetter: No, I was gonna say then, I kind of started off by talking about, you know, humans augmented by AI, and just AI, and I think, as you sort of wrap that all together, what it really comes down to is we are in a world where we’re moving from the traditional org chart. And so, for example, in product marketing, quite often big debates: “do you have your org chart by products, by segments, by geos?” To what’s now more of a task chart or a work chart, basically. What jobs are there to be done where you combine three levels, the human, the contractor, ’cause I still think there is a big element also that contractors external can play and the bot, and bring all those together. That’s the next frontier for folks like you and I who have managed a team.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, no. I think it’s interesting, and that’s jobs to be done theory is very good. I think you imply that to B2C as well, finding out what customers’ jobs to be done in B2C environments as well as B2B.

Jason Hemingway: Well, look, to a little bit of a light relief section that we always have in the podcast about that. I bet you’re glad. So, we call this the inbox confession. I always ask everyone in leadership positions. What’s the one thing you wish you could automate in your workday?

Axel Kirstetter: I mean, look for me, it’s definitely the volume and variety of emails that are causing a little bit. There’s also a saying that responding to emails is not getting work done, and when you get sucked into just, you know, in the morning, just responding to emails. Yeah, it’s very true. You don’t feel like you’ve done anything.

Axel Kirstetter: And so, you know, I prefer in the mornings, I prefer to do, like, my more heavy work of writing a document, or sort of, you know, highly productive work. But then you also have, inevitably, during the day, like 10, 15 minutes here, a meeting that finishes early, or that’s when I try to do my emails.

Axel Kirstetter: But then you have, you know, a variety of emails. I could respond to this over here, that over there, and it would be nice if there was some kind of a tool that automated my thinking, my responses for the type of things that came my way.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, so basically, you want an email clone of yourself.

Axel Kirstetter: Kind of.

Jason Hemingway: But not clone, because you want it to do the thinking as well for you.

Axel Kirstetter: My challenge is more part of responding to an email means you need to read it. Reading it means you consume information. That bit is something I can’t automate. Like, how do I find out what’s happening? Unless I sort of have a consumption mechanism built in as well. So that’s my challenge. Like, there are tools that allow you to, you know, understand this stuff. Yes. Approved. No way that you can sort of automate. But I need to know, like, who is the person that regularly asks for exceptions to be approved? As a manager, that’s information that, you know, I’d like to know. And that is, I consume that, I don’t know what that’s going to be.

Axel Kirstetter: It is tricky. Well, I don’t know, there’s probably somebody who could possibly develop that for you, Axel. I’ll have to see as the world gets better. So let’s get, let’s dive back in a little bit to your experience and particularly in that product marketing sort of area. So you talked about this, you know, highly-regulated industries that vary across different geographies. What has that meant in terms of how you build your product marketing function?

Axel Kirstetter: Yeah, that’s a good one. You know what? Something that a lot of people aren’t aware of, especially in the States, but there is something called regional product marketing. Product marketing, quite often, is associated as being a corporate function. That isn’t necessarily the case. Yes. Positioning messaging tends to be more aligned with sort of where the CEO’s head is at and, you know, you gotta sort of validate that. But then there’s also a heavy field element, and that’s sort of typically more regional product marketing, which focuses on kind of three things on evangelizing the message,

Axel Kirstetter: So whereas, in a sort of headquarters-centric environment, you have product managers that would go and speak at conferences or speak in front of clients. In a field environment, it typically falls on product marketing to represent the roadmap in front of customers and/or, you know, speak at conferences, the vision and so forth. So evangelization. Stretch out also into podcasts, into any recordings, blogs, et cetera. Inbound element, meaning usually you do not have a product manager in the country, in region falls on product marketing to wrap up, “Hey, how can we be more successful?”

Axel Kirstetter: Win-loss analysis, feedback from sales engineering and from sales. We’re going after these markets, and feed that back into the development cycles from product managers.

Axel Kirstetter: And then, the third area is really all around enabling the sales team. So, that’s a bit more on that outbound responsibility. Great. We have these centralized messages, HQ, my job is now to adapt them to the local circumstance, you know, the cloud was for long time, this case where cloud and state’s great, but where’s my data hosted?

Axel Kirstetter: The US product manager marketer would never be able to talk about the local data hosting GDPR. What the heck is GDPR? And so that comes down to the local person then to say, and here’s how you address GDPR with our offering, which is sort of that next level positioning, that making it relevant to the local market, very powerful to help the sort of internationalization of the market, but also very difficult to do unless you have that initial [00:24:00] headquarters structure in the first place. And headquarters structures, you can do it by subject matter expertise: here’s your enabling guy, here’s your competitive guy, here’s your sort of messaging person. You can do it by product lines. And then you were struggling with, well, how do we now do competitive intelligence that then falls on the manager to…

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, to figure that problem out. Yup.

Axel Kirstetter : Exactly. I’ve also, you know, that inevitable product marketing has two words in it: product and marketing. And so, do you gravitate more to the product side?

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Axel Kirstetter : Risk of product documentation, right, which is not ideal. Or do you gravitate more to the marketing side? Risk of just doing campaigning. So you’re gonna find a balance between the two, but inevitably, customer proximity is super important in this role, and it’s always a bit of a fight to talk to customers, listen to customers, participate in sales cycles, and pull yourself out of the product management, depending on what needs to be done.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah, and I think one of the things that you’ve talked about at length in other things that I’ve seen is this kind of product marketing as, kind of, a growth operating system. If you can get that balance right between that marketing and product, and it is a hard balance. Are there any signs that you’ve seen when you’re thinking about it globally that it’s not working? What are the early signs that “Oh, it’s not working. How do we kind of remediate that?”

Axel Kirstetter : Before I address your question, let me just make the point of what the product marketing operates.

Jason Hemingway: Yeah. Go. Go. Go. Go. Love that. Yeah. Sorry. For the listener who doesn’t know

Axel Kirstetter: Yeah. For the listener. Advertising my own ideas. Yeah. I think the product marketing operating system is basically how can a product marketing team operate that becomes predictable and transparent? That’s kind of the vision behind it.

Jason Hemingway: Mm-hmm.

Axel Kirstetter: And it really starts, it is sort of a couple steps to go through, but essentially, like what’s happening in market? Market insight? Many ways of getting that. It could be win-loss analysis, competitive intelligence, analyst understanding, influencer listening, whatever it might be. But we need to have a groundwork of what problem are we solving? For step one. Step two is then turning that into a marketing plan, whereas you prioritize things, and by the way, I use the term very loosely, a marketing plan. The marketing team also produces a marketing plan. It’s neither here nor there. But essentially, commit to what you’re going to do so that others understand, Hey, when am I going to get, or am I going to get some kind of content I can utilize my campaigns? Or are we going to document, you know, this product via, I don’t know, a sell sheet, et cetera?

Axel Kirstetter: After that, and kind of in parallel, the very first thing you gotta do is come up with good positioning messaging for the thing that you’re launching, representing, that’s solving the problem that you’ve had in step one. And then step four would be activating your other assets, your bills and materials that you commit to in your marketing plan. I don’t like doing a website before you get the positioning message straight, because that’s where a lot of effort is being spent on aligning the internal team. Do we agree? These are the alternatives. Do we agree? This is our unique differentiator. And basically putting it down in a framework that makes sense. Reality is sometimes you gotta do things in parallel. Yes, you might have to launch the website before the positioning is done, but do make sure that as you go through the phases, you go back again, fix positioning, and if something’s changed, you fix the website. And then obviously you’ve got the measuring, metering that comes out. I like to separate it between, sort of, tracking of information, and then the other part, essentially, is you know, analyzing the information. So one thing is, here’s what happened and here’s what should be happening. That’s the product market operating system, hugely helpful for indicating predictability, varies also by region, so, same type of bills or materials or similar type of bill materials. But you can have a regional battle card, for example. Competitors regionally have different dynamics as well. That will be down to the regional specialist. Now, Jason, I forgot the question you actually asked me.

Axel Kirstetter: Well, the second part of it, which is, okay, so you’ve got that you’ve laid down, and I think the answer’s in the latter part of what you said, that tracking and understanding metrics is what sort of signals do you look for that might mean you need to take action other than the obvious, which would be product isn’t selling quick enough, or hitting our growth targets?

Axel Kirstetter : So, you always have leading and trading indicators. And the cycle’s always, you know, the launch. Like, the launch is the timeframe. I always believe in pre-launching things, so, you know, the movies are coming soon, or cinema nearby coming soon, teasers.

Jason Hemingway: The teaser.

Axel Kirstetter: Teasers. Teasers. You gotta warm up your market a little bit. There’s difference between lead generation, demand generation. Be clear about the objectives that you’re trying to achieve. Very different. Are you selling this to net new customers and net new markets? Are you trying to squeeze this to existing customers?

Axel Kirstetter: All that is inevitably going to vary. But then essentially, leading indicators will be things like email, open rates, click-through rates, these sorts of things, website visits, click-through on campaigns, et cetera. And then trading indicators will be things like applying that now to your ideal customer profile.

Axel Kirstetter: Do we, you know, make you know the success in our ideal customers? Yes. You know, revenue and what have you, also a sort of satisfaction understanding, like, are sellers satisfied? Are customers satisfied? You can usually tell if the sales team goes like, huh…? You know, don’t, if they’re not excited about what it is, don’t expect them to be selling it.

Axel Kirstetter: And whether it’s direct sales or indirect, there’s usually some kind of an indicator as to where you stand. PR comes into it as well. No coverage means the sort of influencer audience is not particularly excited about what there is, which means, you know, do you have the right ICP? Or is it just not hitting the right messages?

Axel Kirstetter: So, all of these things you can have your feelers out, and you can listen to, but then yes, to your point, Jason, if it ain’t selling, nothing’s going to stop that.

Axel Kirstetter: Yeah, I mean, that is the ultimate measure, right? If no one’s, I’d also say usage stats are quite good for certain products. It’s now who’s going in and looking at the new things that you’ve launched. What’s the uptake of that, and what’s the user base look like? But brilliant, I mean, there’s lots to unpack in there, but in the interest of time, we’re gonna move swiftly on to, sort of more, to the leadership lessons, Axel, because you’ve learned a lot over your career from, as I said at the very beginning, that kind of lean startup emotion to that kind of large organizations, something like Guidewire.

Axel Kirstetter: But what lessons have you learned that you think somebody would be interested in scaling those businesses? There’s a whole bunch of things to think about, but the one thing I always come back to is one of the lessons I learned in my very early days from a CEO, who had a very simple, sort of management philosophy, which is focus and execute.

Axel Kirstetter: And so focus is really around, you know, what are you going to do? And what are you going to do is really all about what am I not going to do? People always think about, you know, I need to do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, yes, but really like you’re not doing, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 actually means you’re doing 1 & 2 because as you prioritize things, you know, the other stuff just falls off the bandwagon, and ‘execute’ is all about like, you gotta commit to what you do.

Axel Kirstetter: Yes, you can, others depend on the work that you do and certainly in product marketing, and I think also marketing general, you gotta earn the right to be at the table. Like, you can’t just go in there and expect everyone to embrace you because you’ve got this title, what have you. You gotta earn the right to be there. So, if you say we’re going to launch by, I don’t know, by September of 2025. Then you gotta launch by September 2025. Obviously, from the production’s side, things changed, and you know, it’s not your fault, but you can’t let, like, the bills and materials slip.

Axel Kirstetter: You can’t let the message testing slip. There’s the sort of requirements to get there, that’s the execute part of it. That stuff works irrespectively of where you’re at, obviously locally, regionally, internationally. I do think it’s important to, as you develop the messaging, check in with the local team. Does this work as well?

Axel Kirstetter: And people sometimes get stuck at the specific word level, which I recommend not to do; some words just do not work in other language, but it’s the spirit of what you’re trying to say. And then you have the option, well, do we just impose the word and look a little bit foolish, maybe with the benefit that the standardization makes it easier to just be locally present?

Axel Kirstetter: Or do we, you know, localize, that’s where the word comes into it, localize the specific word and have a bit of variety in, or variability in, especially our channel execution. Got to trust your team. Got to talk to your team. Depends on what kind of culture one is. Depends on the speed to market. Both work.

Axel Kirstetter: No. And I think that whole idea of focus and execution is massive. At Phrase, we have this idea of, we call it a cadence. We release every quarter, and we have a T minus principle, and we map it all out from the research to the product requirement documentation to the consultant marketing, messaging and position, and it operates at T minus 30, T minus 10, T minus 5, you know, as you build up to a launch of the new product, or capability. So yeah, I mean, I’m a massive believer in that kind of execution is key, but execution could also mean executing in terms of the strategic thinking that comes up front, I think as well, but anyway. Look, well, I’ve taken off loads of your time, Axel. Brilliant. Thank you very much. But I’ve got three quick-fire questions. So, if you’re gonna pick a market to launch in next, what would it be?

Axel Kirstetter: I would love to do some work in China. Fascinating market. Huge market. Uniquely regulatory challenges. Never worked in China, Taiwan, well, separate country, and Hong Kong. I don’t really count Hong Kong. Would love to be doing something mainland China.

Jason Hemingway: Love it. Love it. If you could describe global growth in one word, what would it be?

Axel Kirstetter: Yesteryear. I am not a big believer that there is such thing as global growth.

Axel Kirstetter: There is international expansion, which is really a local expansion. And, you know, country by country, case by case, you can’t just take one thing and certainly sell it globally; you have to have a distribution channel, you have to have a consumer channel, and that stuff takes time. So, you can take something from the UK and sell it in Brazil, great. You can take it, but you can’t take it from UK to Brazil and then UK to China at the same time. You gotta pick. And that’s conscious choice. So global growth, especially also, nowadays with all of these trade barriers.

Jason Hemingway: Maybe you could say it’s choice. I don’t know. It’s choices, even that’s one word. Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know. Don’t wanna put words in your mouth. Right. Last one. Bit of a fun one. Any book or podcast you recommend for people to listen to or read?

Axel Kirstetter : Tons. I’m reading an interesting book myself right now. But the one I’m gonna throw out there, because I’ve been sort of getting my hand on a very early access book, is by a friend of mine, Jessica Schwarze. Her book is literally now just coming on Amazon and Kindle, but coming in a print version very soon, 200+ Tactics to Stop Leaks, Capture Leads, and Drive Revenue. Expert in APAC marketing, it’s her second book. I understand the first one, a bit of a hot seller. I expect the second one to be an equal hot seller.

Axel Kirstetter: Tons of AI information, very practical. Anyone can influence some of the stuff, so that’s from a professional perspective.

Jason Hemingway: Lovely.

Jason Hemingway: Axel, all the remains for me to say is thank you very much for your time. And it was great to catch up after a few years, but brilliant to see you.

Axel Kirstetter: Thank you, Jason. And for the listeners, I don’t want anyone to confuse anyone. To be successful in this field, you need to have glasses and a graying beard.

Axel Kirstetter: There’s plenty of ways; one can be entering the profession and be successful.

Jason Hemingway: Good stuff, Axel. Thanks again and speak to you soon.

Axel Kirstetter: Thanks, Jason.

Jason Hemingway: Well, thanks, Axel. That was great. I really enjoyed it, especially your more than clear take on the future of product marketing and global marketing in general. And with that, that’s it for another episode of In Other Words, a podcast from Phrase.

I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a huge thank you to Axel Kirstetter for sharing such valuable expertise on scaling go-to-market, leveraging AI and leading teams through transformation.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to In Other Words on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also find more conversations on leadership growth and what it takes to scale businesses globally at Phrase.com. Thanks for tuning in, and see you next time.